Angelus suspensus. Essays über die Geduld der Engel (7)

They do not see, they remember. They do not remember, they forget. Their gaze is not a movement. But a stillness that advances? What we call the world is, in their eyes, a wanderer’s path that points itself out. The angels do not intervene, because they penetrate everything. They allow everything, because they change nothing. They do not order, they entangle the threads. They do not wait, they listen to the pulse of time. Can angels squint? If angels are blind in one eye – are they then half-sighted? Can angels see? So many notions of angels.

Perhaps angels are not only messengers, but also chroniclers; they bring not only messages but are also witnesses to small and great events in the history of humanity. As such they resemble the chronicler Walter Benjamin, “who tells the events without distinguishing great and small” and “so that truth’s accounting is kept, that nothing that has ever happened is lost to history.” Perhaps they are particular chroniclers who summarise the events of the past in a single glance.

Rilke’s angels, the guardians of the incomprehensible, see everything. “Vues des anges, les cimes des arbres peut-être sont des racines, buvant les cieux.” (Seen by angels, the treetops may be roots, drinking in the heavens. Vergers) For them, height equals depth, depth still unsavoury, that which devours itself four times until it at last touches the lips. What remains is a flow that never begins. It stirs the world by keeping itself apart from it.

I did not release my angel for a long time,
and he impoverished me in my arms
and became small, and I became great:
and suddenly I was mercy itself,
and he merely a trembling plea.

There I gave him his heavens,
and he gave me what was near, from which he receded;
he learned to hover, I learned to live,
and slowly we recognised one another…

Since my angel no longer watches over me,
he can freely unfold his wings
and pierce the stillness of the stars –
for he must not hold my fearful hands
during my lonely night –
since my angel no longer watches over me.

Rilke’s angel can unfold his wings and fly only when the I lets him go, when it frees him. He learns to hover, his human learns to live. In mutual recognition, both are free from one another.

Benjamin’s angel, the unfolded witness, enacts progress by retreat. “It is a storm blowing from Paradise; it has entangled itself in its own wings.” (On the Concept of History) His gaze holds time to itself and yet divides it in halves. He then sees again ruins that do not permit destruction, and destruction that knows no ruins. He wishes to linger and all together to be one, yet his lingering slips away. He does not see what has happened; he sees what never would have.

As little as it contributes to the understanding of humans to speak of them as “the Human,” so little does it help to write of angels in the general plural.

For not only has heavenly bureaucracy organised them into three heavenly hierarchies with three choirs each, thereby assigning every angel his place and rank within the total choir. Nor should we forget all the angels who turn away from this bureaucracy – who fall away, as is said. Those who set out to go their own ways, alone or in free groups. Those who seek new tasks, no longer locatable within the heavenly order – they see things differently.

Klee’s Angelus Novus is such an angel – a new angel. New to Benjamin not merely in the sense of the Kabbalah, which speaks of fleets of angels that arise and pass away in an instant, praising God. Klee’s angel is Benjamin only at his arrival in Benjamin’s room; soon he presents himself as such, as the testimony of Scholem.

Benjamin’s angel of history, in his IXth Philosophical Thesis of History, forms the interpretation and completion of his contemplation of angels. In the moment when he describes Klee’s Angelus Novus, this angel transforms into the angel of history.

This angel has turned his face to the past; the future, therefore, lies behind him. Odd for all those who fancy the past behind them and the future before them. Familiar is this view to those proficient in Hebrew. The word for “past” in the language of the Hebrew Bible is לְפָנִים lefanin/lifne, which means roughly “before the face / in front.” The past is thus something that is in view. Also קֶדֶם qedem points to front, to the forepart – and to the east, the direction in which the Garden of God lies. Origin as the beginning of time. In the time of the end, when Benjamin’s angel of history recapitulates this in his gaze every second, on the cusp of a messianic moment, the primordial origin is driven out of the historical process as a goal.

Having the future behind one’s back, אַחֲרִית aharit (aharit, aharon/End, future, last time) – the angel of history is driven backwards into the future by the storm that comes from the east. Having the future behind one does not mean having finished with it.

Benjamin closes his History-Philosophical Theses with Appendix B:

“As is known, Jews were forbidden to inquire into the future. The Torah and prayer, however, instruct them in the remembrance. But the future was not therefore made into homogeneous and empty time for the Jews. For in it every second was the small gate through which the Messiah could pass.”

Thus there is hope – that the second of Chronos can be transformed into the moment of Kairos. But not for Benjamin himself. Until the end, until he had to stop being hopeless. The history-philosophical theses are Benjamin’s last writings. Receding before the catastrophe that breaks not only over Europe and the people living there, he could not ultimately save himself. In the night of 26 to 27 September 1940 he took his own life in the Spanish border town Port-Bou, with the looming extradition to NS henchmen in view. His Angelus Novus, the image by Klee, he had, at the outset of his flight, given to Georges Bataille, together with a final bundle of his writings.

The Angelus Novus thus heralds for Benjamin not only imminent misfortune, but also the possible arrival of the Messiah at every second. He will not heal the wounds of the past, but will alter history by a decisive nuance. As a historical materialist, Benjamin regards history not as a linear, continuously advancing time (Chronos), but as one of ruptures and gaps in which the utopian, the messianic, resides. Not only at the end of all times, but in the time of the End, in every moment that succeeds in manifesting itself as the present moment within chronologically progressing time.

Perhaps this resembles what Freud means when, in his Studies on Hysteria, he writes that much has already been won, that hysterical suffering can be transformed into ordinary misfortune. For Freud, it is not suffering’s elimination that matters, but a qualitative transformation – or a change of perspective.

But what do angels see? Perhaps they are blind, and their eyes are not mirrors but old gates through which no one steps any more. Perhaps they are not beings, but events that are missed. Perhaps their eyes are windows that offer no view and reflect everything. Perhaps angels do nothing, because the universe unfolds and contracts more quickly than they can respond – and they listen from outside to what is heard. Perhaps they see nothing, because almost nothing is audible – like a fading pulse. And to that they listen. Visio beatifica – the blessed vision of angels (and of humans), in which they can see and recognise God directly – a gaze that makes all fall silent in order to create all. Perhaps the seeing of angels is a timbre that is more than high. Perhaps angels are not there – and precisely for that reason it is as it is.

And: How do angels look? Do they focus their eyes on a single event at a time? Do they, as guardian angels, concentrate on one person, on their human? Do they praise God at the moment of their becoming and passing away with Mirror-eyes? Or is their seeing a wandering glance, indifferently roaming, with or without satisfaction? Or one of a evenly suspended attention, akin to the analyst’s listening behind the couch? Then within it there would be an interest, and someone who enters its path will recognise themselves in it as intended, unaware of its source …

And does their message lie in the way they reveal all this to those who will not be dazzled by the guardians of splendour and who can at least for the brief span between two moments override the power of the proclaimers of progress, that very span which anticipates the possibility of another history?

Marlen Wagner
Tom Sojer
Robert Krokowski

Marlen Wagner
Tom Sojer
Robert Krokowski